My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store

by Ben Ryder Howe

  Speaking for myself, the biggest change has been a kind of loosening of that legendary clenched-sphincter Puritan uptightness. Even with a store as small as ours you can control almost nothing—except maybe the environment. And I had tried. Imposing my will on the music or the coffee was a way of making me feel like we were also capable of influencing bigger things, like our fate as a family or my marriage. However, it was even worse than I feared—in addition to all the things about a streetside business that are fundamentally chaotic, there was Dwayne, and there was the built-in instability of our neighborhood, and there was all the arguing at home, which made decision making of any kind all but impossible. Gradually, I began to surrender some of my own ability to control—a decision here and a decision there. Nothing since then has happened that I can directly attribute to my new, Zen frame of mind, and yet I’m almost sure that it has helped. For one thing, the inventory (which is essentially the store itself) has attained a kind of equilibrium: we’re no longer the junk food bazaar we were when we took over, but we never got more than halfway to being the gourmet market I wanted to be, either. The store is a mutant, a hybrid. It isn’t coherent in the slightest—the first time people come in, they often get that “Huh?” look on their faces as they struggle to process the mixed signals sent by a lottery machine and tofu jerky, or by Olde English malt liquor and Belgian Trappist beer. But I learned to accept this and so did most of the customers, maybe because our lives weren’t coherent. New York wasn’t coherent. Why force it to be?

  The reward has been that after being a spaz my whole life—I’m a socially nervous person and always will be—I have an almost greater comfort with strangers than I do with people I know well. Standing there all day not knowing who’s going to come in next or what they’re going to say, you have almost no choice except to become a bit more easygoing, and to trust more. It’s a good thing. Everyone should work at a checkout counter for some part of their lives.

  PROBLEM EMPLOYEE

  AFTER SIX MONTHS OF WORKING WITH DWAYNE, I STILL CAN’T decide if he’s the store’s biggest asset or worst liability. On the positive side, you have an employee who shows up for work on time six days a week and frequently comes in on his off day as well. You have an employee who when he’s at work rarely stops working, whether he’s washing refrigerator doors or assembling Sunday newspapers. You have an employee who’s essentially a foolproof government sting detector, a discouragement to would-be troublemakers and the convenience store equivalent of Daniel Boulud or some celebrity chef, all rolled up into one.

  On the other hand, you have an employee who is a constant headache, whether he’s openly disobeying instructions, second-guessing his bosses in front of customers, barking at the customers themselves or merely dropping jaws with outrageous behavior and lewd commentary. You have an employee whose friends and family come into the store and do everything possible to distract him. You have an employee who’s almost as much of a magnet for trouble as he is a deterrent.

  And you have the gun.

  I have long worried, without telling anyone, that Dwayne brings a gun to work. One day, early on, Dwayne was carrying on with his usual stories of wildings and carjackings (he had just finished telling me about the time he stabbed a man in the cheek with a fork) when he asked me:

  “So what do you carry?”

  “Carry?”

  “To protect yourself.”

  I was taken off guard (not to mention still getting over that image of the fork in the face). We had been in the store only a week or so, and self-protection was—somewhat bizarrely, in retrospect—way down my list of priorities. I had bigger things to worry about at the time, like remembering the price of Coors Light tallboys and finding the stamina to stay awake. But I didn’t want Dwayne to think that I was so naïve as to have not given the issue thought. So I muttered something I hoped would be indecipherable, somewhere between “I forget” and “a salad fork,” which Dwayne rightly interpreted as “nothing.”

  He was apoplectic, of course. The way he made it sound, brownstone Brooklyn was still an urban combat zone, despite the peaceful changes gentrification had wrought. The store would be robbed sooner or later—it wasn’t a question of if but of how many times. And it was a question of how you responded: submissively or Dwayne-style, which would send a message to the United Convenience Store Stickup Men’s Association, or some similar organization, and determine whether you became a frequent or merely an occasional target. Not preparing yourself wasn’t an option.

  “Well, what do you carry?” I asked.

  With his usual attention to detail, Dwayne cataloged an arsenal that would have given Travis Bickle the willies:

  “… blackjack, throwing star, bolo, chain whip, nunchuks, pepper spray …” By the time he got to the gun he owned (some kind of pistol), it seemed almost like an afterthought, though firearm licenses in New York are hard to come by (obtaining a carry permit is next to impossible). If Dwayne had a gun it was almost certainly illegal, and as someone with a criminal record (I know that Dwayne went to jail when he was young, though I’ve never had the courage to ask what he did), he could do serious time. And we could get in a lot of trouble, too.

  Personally, I hate guns. Not on principle, mind you, but out of fear. I’ve never gotten over the suspicion (planted in me by some after-school special, no doubt) that guns go off by themselves all the time and bullets ricochet off walls until they find a nice, innocent non-gun-owning victim’s forehead to land in.

  So I told Dwayne to leave his weapons at home, which seemed to astonish him at first. Eventually, he relented. Of course, as I was soon to find out, Dwayne made up his own rules at the store, and unless I was going to frisk him every day, there was no way to stop him. Nevertheless, if he had a weapon inside his baggy overalls (or his mysteriously heavy backpack), he didn’t tell me. And sometimes I wondered if we were better off that way, with a sort of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gats and Glocks. There would be times, I would eventually realize, when maybe having a weapon around would not be a categorically awful thing. The pertinent question was whether it should be in the hands of anyone but Dwayne.

  ONE THURSDAY AFTERNOON I’m sitting at my desk at the Review talking to Jack Kerouac’s lawyer in Boston when the line goes dead. Did I say something wrong? I wonder, staring at the receiver. We seemed to be having a perfectly friendly conversation. Why did Jack Kerouac’s lawyer hang up on me? Oh no, have I done it again?

  Then I realize that all the computers in the office have also gone dead, and the air conditioner too, which was laboring to keep up with a ferocious heat wave. “Power outage,” someone says, though this being only two years after September 11, everyone is also acutely aware of that other possibility.

  It’s hard to say which would be more frightening, I think, as I get up from my desk and move outside to the Seventy-second Street Esplanade, where crowds have gathered to see if anyone else knows what’s happening. The rumor is that it’s a blackout, although no one’s really sure. The last time New York had a citywide power outage, during the infamous Summer of Sam, arsonists and looters terrorized the city, and the power didn’t return for days. Here on the Upper East Side, probably the most target-rich neighborhood in the whole city, we’d be sitting ducks. Not in the least bit eager to find out what that’s like, the staff of the Review starts packing up and heading home.

  “Nonsense!” George thunders, having come down from his office. “If the mobs come, we’ll invite them upstairs for a drink.” I can see it: as gangs of rampaging teenagers pound on the door of his townhouse, George leans out his window with a tumbler of Scotch, shouting, “Tally ho! Do you happen to have any ice?” The man simply has no fear (not to mention infinite good-natured trust).

  George wants us to come up to his apartment and make ourselves comfortable, but I grab my backpack and wave good-bye. Not only do I want to be in a different neighborhood by nightfall; I want to make sure the deli is locked up and fortified as tightly as possib
le, to ward off looters for at least a couple of days.

  I start walking toward the subway, but the trains aren’t running, so I walk across the Queensboro Bridge with a few thousand other jittery (literally—the bridge is wobbling) souls. Once I’ve escaped Manhattan I feel better, but now it’s almost five o’clock and the light is starting to fade. Never has the long summer sunset felt so ominous, like that point in a horror movie when you know that the eyeball-less monsters with blood dripping from their mouths are about to emerge from their lairs. And I have yet to see a single police officer.

  In Brooklyn, I come across a pack of anxious, sweaty commuters standing on a corner listening to a battery-powered radio. “It’s a blackout,” someone says, “not a bomb. The mayor just said so.” The crowd issues a collective sigh of relief, but are we really supposed to feel better? Apparently the whole eastern seaboard is without electricity. Nearly one-fourth of the entire country! It’s the biggest blackout in history! Now I’m really starting to worry—how many days can the store’s steel shutters hold up in case people try to break in? Would it be wiser to move all the merchandise to Kay’s house? Does somebody need to stay behind and stand guard? I have images of myself barricaded inside the darkened store, holding off a siege with … stale sandwich rolls? the deli slicer? I wouldn’t even be able to defend myself with hot coffee, since the coffeemaker won’t work. Then again, maybe the store will smell so bad after a few days that the mobs won’t even want to come in.

  That’s not likely. As any petty thief worth his salt would know, a convenience store would contain thousands of dollars in phone cards, scratch-off lottery tickets and tobacco. Moreover, after a few hours looters wouldn’t come just for the high-value goods—they’d do it for the thrill, or the beer, and then after the food runs out and New York begins to starve, they’d come for the cat food, which in our dawning Mad Max–style future will be just as valuable as gold.

  The more I worry, the more I want to get to the store, but it’s getting harder to keep going in the direction I keep telling my legs to move in—namely, forward—because thanks to the peculiar bend of my journey, from the Upper East Side through Queens and then back toward downtown Brooklyn, I’m now going against the crowd of commuters exiting Manhattan, which is sort of like trying to reenter Yankee Stadium just after the last pitch of the ninth inning. And this isn’t even the thickest or sweatiest part of the horde; it’s the minority that was undaunted by the prospect of walking eight or ten miles in record heat and started as soon as the blackout began, rather than waiting to see if the power came back on. Any second now I’m going to get trampled by a much larger wave of workers exiting the Financial District. And how many would there be? Half a million? A million? In this heat, a million people constitutes a veritable Bataan Death March. There would be people coming over the Brooklyn Bridge who got winded climbing a single flight of stairs, people in suits and high heels, people freaked out if not for themselves then for the family members they’ve been unable to contact, as the city’s cell phone network is currently overloaded. What good is a cell phone if it doesn’t work in an emergency? they’d be wondering, and Why did the city have to get rid of all its pay phones? Next they’d be cursing the city for removing its park benches: Where exactly is a tired person supposed to sit? And what happened to the drinking fountains? And where are all the police officers? And how come downtown Brooklyn doesn’t have street vendors anymore, somewhere to at least buy a soda? They’d be getting angrier, more frustrated and more desperate as they trekked down Boerum Place, a forbidding and seemingly endless street of unapproachable courthouses connecting the Brooklyn Bridge to Atlantic Avenue, and then as they turned east on Atlantic they’d be thinking, Finally! A normal street with stores! But then they’d have to walk two more blocks, past the jail and the parking lots, just to get to their first convenience store since they left Manhattan, in all probability well over two hours ago.

  That store would be ours.

  Walk faster! Suddenly I have this feeling that the store has not been shut down. We’ve never actually talked about what to do in a public emergency. Would Kay be tempted to stay open and use this opportunity to make money? Of course she would, you moron! Hurry!

  Minutes later I see our distinctive awning, and with a tremor I realize that the store is indeed open and utterly besieged. Thousands of people are trying to get through our door.

  In their way stands Dwayne, who is partly succeeding at managing the flow, but this is a societal breakdown, and these are dehydrated people in the grip of mass hysteria, or worse, women who need to pee.

  After fighting my way in, I see Gab and Kay behind the counter.

  “What are you doing?” I yell above the roaring crowd.

  They look at me as if this is the stupidest question they’ve ever heard. What would be the proper response? Serving a line that starts back in Manhattan? Making money faster than we’ve ever made it before? There is something that does sort of require explanation, however: Why are Kay and Gab both wearing money, as if it were some kind of fashion statement to cover yourself in damp bills?

  “We can’t use the cash register,” Gab shouts, “so we have to store it on our bodies.” She points at herself: she has fives tucked into one rolled-up, sweat-soaked shirt sleeve and tens tucked into the other, and twenties under her collar. All smaller denominations she has in her hands or on the counter, although it’s clearly becoming impossible to count loose change as the store gets dark.

  As if what’s going on outside the store—the crowds trying to get in, the growing mayhem—weren’t enough, this is a complication I hadn’t even considered, and yet another reason to close down immediately.

  But Gab and Kay won’t have any of it. People aren’t just buying refreshments to cool off; they’re grabbing anything off the shelves they can get their hands on. Meanwhile, the temperature inside our refrigerators is rising (and every time somebody opens one of the doors, it rises even faster). By midnight the milk and orange juice will have spoiled, the ice cream will just be cream, and the cheese will be Cheez Whiz. In the morning the cold cuts will have to be tossed out—and basically that’s half the store right there. Who knows when we’ll get any of it back. Even if the blackout ends tonight, tomorrow is Friday and the deliverymen might not come for almost a week. Then we’ll lose the bread, fruits and vegetables; plus, each night that the city is without power is another night with a big LOOT ME sign spray-painted on the facade. At last I understand the situation. We could be facing losses that take us into going-out-of-business territory, so why not get rid of as much merchandise as possible? It would seem foolish not to.

  If only the store weren’t so vulnerable and exposed. Money is everywhere and getting harder to keep track of. As I join Kay and Gab behind the counter, it occurs to me that we’re conducting an elaborate charade wherein we pretend that people actually have to pay us for the merchandise they take from our shelves, as if there would be consequences should they not. In truth, anybody can do anything they want to us right now: take our stuff, steal our money, burn us to the ground.

  Just as I find myself wishing I hadn’t told Dwayne to leave his weapons at home, a police officer comes to the store, the first I’ve seen since this whole episode started. He approaches Dwayne and says, “It’s crazy out here. You got your piece?”

  “ ‘Course!” says Dwayne exuberantly.

  “Good,” says the cop. “You need any ammo?”

  “Nah, I’m square,” Dwayne says. And the cop goes off, probably to hide in his car.

  It’s finally getting dark outside now, and inside the store, where it’s been dark already for a while, we’re establishing a system that will allow us to remain open for a few more hours: holding candles or flashlights in one hand, we individually escort customers using the other hand to the places in the store where the items they want are located. Since many of the customers we’re getting now fall into the straggler category—the old, out of shape, and barely ambulatory—a lot o
f the hands tremble as you hold them, and the voices heave with exhaustion as they tell you things like:

  “Ain’t walked this far in twenty-five years, still got ten more miles to go. I’m going to pick up some groceries now and carry them home, because I don’t think there’s going to be anything left in all of Brooklyn by the time I get there.”

  It’s an intimate interaction: you and this stranger whose face you will never see walking hand in hand to the canned vegetable aisle, and ultimately it’s the sort of moment that this blackout will be remembered for, for that night the city does not erupt into lawlessness. On the contrary, it breaks out in rooftop parties, impromptu midnight parades, civilians taking on the role of traffic cops, and other abnormal acts of neighborliness. At the store, we empty our shelves and refrigerators by ten o’clock, then drive back to Staten Island, where the lights blink on at three A.M.

  The next day (and for years afterward) I refuse to believe that I really saw what I saw between Dwayne and the police officer, but one day I ask him and with a laugh he confirms it was real. “Hell yeah,” he says. “Hell yeah.”

  THE GOOD DWAYNE—a courageous, loyal and street-smart watch-keeper—is almost always followed by an appearance of the scary Dwayne, however.

  On another hot night around the time of the blackout, a man walks into the store while Dwayne and I are on duty and starts taking off his clothes. It’s always sort of surprising how popular the practice of shedding one’s garments in convenience stores is. This is our second naked customer of the evening. However, unlike the previous one, this person is ripped with eerily twitching muscles, has a look on his face that suggests he just finished chewing on a high-voltage wire, and refuses to get dressed or leave until we provide him with a bottle of Heineken.

  “Friend, you better get out of here before you get in trouble you can’t get out of,” Dwayne growls. To which the man only laughs in response—a ghoulish, soul-chilling cackle. Then he lifts up a dirty bandage wrapped around his shoulder and shows off a gaping, blood-encrusted bullet hole above his heart that could not be more than a few hours old.